Next on Gallery America, we meet a Locust Grove poet who followed her passion to create a one of a kind museum.

That and more beginning now.

Hello, Oklahoma.

Welcome to Gallery America.

The show that brings you the best of art in Oklahoma and around the nation.

Today we're going to Locust Grove to go to one of the most amazing and surprising museums in the country is the brainchild of a local poet who wants you to become the poet.

It's the Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry.

Question.

Are you ready to rock?

Say yes.

It's not real easy to become the poem, especially because people, for the most part, are suspicious of poetry and suspicious of poets.

But if you want to be a person who lives like a poem lives, which means that you are breathing and present and alive and feeling every cell of your body, you have to be able to really let yourself experience it and trust your powers of observation, because that's what being a poem is about, being the person who is fully themselves and also fully aware of their place in the world.

So one day Dad happened to come by on his golf cart just wheeling around.

Hey, what would you think if I turned the old barn into a poetry museum?

sure!

not good for nothing else anyway.

Excellent.

So the first museum in that barn shared.

That was my dad's tractor shop is on a piece of land that's been in our family for 100 or so years, and it didn't have any money to spend on the museum.

And so everything that I made exhibit wise and everything that's in there was things that I just found in my house or my family's house or they gave to me or I took out the trash.

You have to be a certain kind of person to be able to just start a museum.

The Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry.

ROMP.

I wanted that after acronym because when I started the museum, that's what I wanted it to be a place for people to romp.

a place for people to just come in and experience poetry in a way that they never had.

There are many museums that are dedicated to a specific poet, but there is only one other museum in the United States that just dedicated to poetry in general, and that's the American Poetry Museum in Washington, D.C. And so, so were the other one.

And it is definitely unique.

This is the town mural.

Three fourths of it, five, six of it, whatever.

Town founder O.W.

Killam glares at us like The Wizard of Oz and just as unlucky.

This mural is the third one.

It suffered a roof collapse.

Taking the wonder out of the Wonder City on the Grand River.

But that is the way with small towns.

The flaws are always most visible.

The Wonder City on the Grand River is just a small rural community.

You know, It's like the back of my hand.

Ranch house.

She drove there on a tractor because she wasn't allowed to use the car.

One night the tractor was broken and she got a ride.

Dad said to her, Can I drive you home?

And she said, Somebody has to.

When we moved to town.

We were in walking distance of sale Barn, Couch family mecca of cardboard boxes full of stuffed animals, cattle for auction, popsicles, marbles of every size and color, everything reachable from the grade school by merely slipping under the fence at recess on a Thursday afternoon.

Anything could be had at the sale barn.

Anything could happen in this rural Oklahoma bazaar.

Thank you, brother.

Thank you, man.

This is the town that I grew up in.

This is an infuriating town.

And it's a town that I love too.

I mean, and that's that poetry to me now can be both infuriating and a love of your life at the same time.

Bud Springs.

Sometimes the blessing is a trickle, sometimes a gusher.

Sometimes the spirits of the woods favor us.

Sometimes, like the Civil War battle that took place here.

They haunt us with only vapor, a memory, a longing for the unknown to come of.

Well, besides the physical museum, there are a lot of things that we do that people engage in, and that's we do have events.

We have an annual festival where we give away the awards for the Oklahoma Poem contest this year, 2024.

We had a record 683 entries and only 12 winners.

It's tough to choose.

Today we are celebrating the birthday of Yevgenney Yevtushenko.. *Russian Poetry * one of the most famous of Russian poets and he spent quite a bit of time in Oklahoma.

Zhenya Yevtushenko, Yevgenys son, is a also a fabulous poet, and he's on the rise and he is working on a memoir about his father.

My nerves are strained like wires between the city of no.

The city of Yes.

Shaun to me, is everything that I love about Oklahoma.

I think we all have a sense of place that kind of forms in us a little bit.

And I think prompt specifically, not only has this incredible sense of place and belonging, but also as a window into into a world and that world happens to be poetry.

*Cherokee poem * everything that we do is is free of charge, just a variety of different things that we do to try and engage every age and every every interest in poetry.

I think we were all poets when you were young and we just lost it somewhere along the way.

So that was more interesting to me is to figure out how if you had lost your ability to be a poet, why and how did you lose it?

And it's possible to get it back if you are willing to step in that door and if you are curious enough to slow down, be present, put your phone away.

Stop worrying what you've got to do now or for now.

You can do it.

It will come to you.

Be sure to check out Shaun website.

ROM poetry .com to find out latest events at ROMP and to sign up for her daily email.

Next for staying in Locust Grove to visit another unexpected place where one word rules them all.

Abracadabra.

Oh!

it's my framed portrait of movie club host Robert Burch.

I was wondering where that went.

Have a look.

Hey, welcome to the magic ShowPlace Theater and Rabbit Hard Hat, Magic Shop.

And welcome to the Enchanted Courtyard.

So this is the Magic Shop.

It's an old time magic shop where we sell magic tricks and magic books and DVDs have a lot of fun.

Okay.

And this is the magic showPlace Theater.

Ahead is the parlor stage to your right is Houdini's library.

And we have the New Orleans Saloon today at the Magic Show Place.

We're having an old time magicians get together.

Okay.

Do me a favor.

Hold out your hand.

Look.

Well, I want you to examine that ring real quick.

That's okay.

Yes.

Okay.

I've got an extra one that I keep right here.

It's great.

And it's kind of like a miniature trade show for magicians.

We're going to have Magic's props that are on display, and they're going to get to see how they work.

All right.

That's right.

So have we got a big loop?

Yeah.

If I had some scissor, I could cut it.

no, I forgot.

I was magic!

I must admit that I'm not very good at this trick, just being honest with you.

So therefore, I'm going to make the handkerchief a little bit smaller and it gets a little smaller and a little smaller.

Smaller?

Yet until you can hardly see the handkerchief at all.

But the sound effects help you.

Thank you.

I would say magic is definitely art because it's a performance, it's a show.

And the Magicians put a lot of effort into the practice and the study of it, and they work on their showmanship skills and look right there.

Okay, let's go and take this card.

And so everyone is don't let me know what it is.

Everybody said, Yeah, and do you remember the card you did?

It was great.

And if you look at doing magic, running this all time magic shop and theater, it's it's really not like work.

I think we are living a dream.

You know, sometimes I pinch myself say, Hey, is this a job or is this play?

For story number three, we're going to meet a Tulsa artist whose realistic drawings of WPA era photographs has spawned a collaboration with a local poet.

Meet Joel Daniel Phillips.

I moved to Tulsa five years ago for the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

We subleased our space in San Francisco back in a year and we're just going to go do a year of, you know, experimenting in Oklahoma, right?

I like a crown jewel.

You get to Tulsa and there are people on the sidewalk saying, Hi, how are you?

You know, like, my God, this is wow, that's a whole different space.

And it really did welcome us with open arms.

I think I am officially a Tulsa artist.

That's a strange thing to say out loud.

Hi, Mom.

I'm from Tulsa now.

I play in the Tulsa city, Saturns.

I'd never played baseball in my life, actually.

Yeah.

So I showed up and immediately took a ball to the throat and then drank some more whiskey and said, I love this.

This is amazing.

Like everything else I do has a ego involved and I believe that there's a conversation that we are all sort of having collectively right now as a society about what truth is.

We're in the era of fake news, fake news, fake news, fake news, false news, deep fake videos, misinformation, fake vaccine cards.

How do we wrestle with this moment?

How do we learn how to believe each other again?

Why does realism matter in an art world that has in most ways moved past it?

And I want to create an experience in which the viewer walks into a room and goes, wow, look at that photograph.

And they step up closer and they realize it's not a photograph, it's a drawing.

And then they have to ask themselves, Is this a real image or is it not?

Is this real realism in the era of fake news?

Sorry, Joe.

Daniel Phillips.

You know, I think the black and white simplifies things, whether it's a hand or an oyster shell, it's all there.

But it removes the complication of color.

So it allows me, when I'm working to really sort of hone in on what I feel like is the the meat and bones of a thing.

Killing the negative is a collaborative series of drawings and poems in response to censored government photographs from the Great Depression.

We have a tendency to think of it as a time in which everyone was sort of equally screwed.

And the reality of the Great Depression was that it actually had a similar socio economic breakdown to what COVID has had for four Americans and people all over the world.

Then a couple of years ago I was on a photo blog and I stumbled on this photograph.

There was this big black dot in the middle of it that somebody had taken a whole punch to the original film Negative.

I stumbled on this whole set of photographs that were censored during the Great Depression.

Most people in America have seen the famous photograph by Dorothea Lange, the migrant mother.

That photograph was commissioned by the US government during the Great Depression to bring attention to the plight of migrant workers who were, by and large leaving Oklahoma and Kansas.

What folks don't know is that there was a man in a darkroom who was deciding what was seen and what wasn't seen, and his name was Roy Stryker.

Roy Stryker, his boss told him, you your goal is to show America to Americans.

The point of these photographs was actually to sell the New Deal.

Here's a problem.

Here's this woman on the side of the road that needs your help and Congress needs to vote for that.

And we need to fix this problem.

There were eventually about 270,000 photographs that were shot, of which approximately 100,000 were killed, whether there were hole punched or thrown away.

So I fell in love with those images.

What rain must come for a black man to wet.

What sound makes us fall?

The deep rivers of my hands, dry creeks, my forehead to Arkansas.

Heat I long to forget.

I found that image the first time I went through the archive.

And I was like, my God.

This image is as powerful as my grandmother photograph, and I've never even heard of it.

How is that possible?

There's a visible interaction between this African-American agricultural laborer and the photographer who is a white man.

Who are you to pause my son up with your whiteness and picture box to demand stillness in a land that little rewards idle?

Joel and I are both Tulsa artist fellows.

And so one day I happened to be passing by his studio and the door was open and I saw the initial studies of this project.

I was immediately struck by the gentlemen's facial expression.

And I said, These images, these people need narratives.

So they need they need voice.

Every day the sun is angry.

This coat, tired as my hope, starving little ones on my brow harvest a dream buried in dust.

Good day, sir.

This is number 60.

And in the killing, the negative.

Serious.

He's an oyster shucker.

And he's sitting on the front step of a weathered building shucking oysters.

I think this actually might be the largest drawing I've ever made.

It changes the way you interact with it.

It becomes like there's a person in the room instead of an image in the room.

I think they're looking at historical images, sort of forces you to wrestle with the complexity of our history and how it could have gone a different way.

It wasn't predestined.

I don't know if it fixes anything.

I wrestle with that a lot, actually.

Yeah, I wish I could say like, yeah, I believe in art and its ability to change the world.

I do.

sometimes i don't.

but do it.

Which maybe tells you that I do as much for me as for anyone else.

And this is my way of wrestling with these questions as if, you know, even if it doesn't result in somebody else rethinking or reconsidering something.

At the very least, I've wrestled with it and I've learned something from it, and I think that's valuable around more.

We started this show talking about how to become the pawn.

Well, this Nevada man you're about to meet knows a lot about transforming, too, because he spent the last 30 years becoming Literary great Mark Twain!

Becoming Mark Twain is fun for me.

You know, you just mess up your hair and slip into a white suit that's kind of rumpled.

Pick up a pie.

I can't talk without it.

After all these years, my name is McEvoy Lane, but I am more recognized as Mark Twain.

Mark Twain was the father of America's literature.

He left us about 28 volumes.

But the ones you might remember most from your childhood were the boy books.

Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

And maybe as you got a little older, Connecticut yanking King Arthur's cart.

My favorite is roughing it because there's a lot in there about Nevada.

I arrived riding a small yellow donkey that was so small.

My feet touch the ground on both sides and he was able to bend around and bite me on the legs.

Before Mark Twain tapped me on the shoulder.

I was in radio and in a perfect place, the Hawaiian Islands.

And I was off the air at 10:00 and on a wave at ten, after I had everything a boy could want except skiing.

So I rented a cabin here at Tahoe for five days.

I was so excited I could hardly sleep the first night.

But it snowed five feet overnight.

It took them five days to plow up to where I was.

I thought it was the worst stroke of luck, but it turned out to be the best.

I threw darts for two days.

Then my elbow gave out and I sat down.

And on the coffee table was the complete essays of Mark Twain.

And I had cabin fever by then.

My brain was soft, so that seed was planted in fertile ground.

It took me ten years to read everything he gave us before I had the courage to go out and have a white suit made and started visiting classrooms in our schools.

I would see ten schools a week and I'd go see secondary schools Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and then on Thursday I'd go see a couple of elementary schools and then Friday try to schedule a middle school to keep from getting soft.

And I'd come home on a gurney.

When I first started portraying Mark Twain, I was 45 years old, so I wanted to sound older.

I wanted to sound 70.

So I would affect my voice.

Well, now old Jim Blaine would get comfortable playing socially charged and tell the story of his grandfather's old ram.

Now I'm older than Twain would be.

I'll be 80 this summer.

So I'm older than he was when he died.

Now I'm trying to sound younger, but you're still throwing that little Missouri accent.

I must confess to you, I have no formal education.

In truth, I am as unlettered as the backside of a tombstone.

But I've gained worlds of knowledge.

Second hand, none of it.

Correct?

No.

All you need for success in this life is ignorance and confidence.

And then success is sure.

Piper's Opera House arrest up there on Bay Street in Virginia City.

And it is a shrine for me.

The luckiest break I ever got was when I was first starting out.

I got a call from Carol Piper Marshall, the great granddaughter of John Piper.

She said, McAvoy, I hear you're portraying Mark Twain in the school's.

I said, Yes, I'm loving and I'm seeing ten schools a week.

She said, How would you like to do two shows a day, six days a week for four months at Piper's over 200 shows, and I got to try out new material on a live audience every day because some of Twain's writing is wonderful literature but does not recite.

And you find out what works with a live audience.

So by the end of that summer of 88, 35 years ago, thanks to Carol Piper Marshall, I wasn't ready for primetime, but I was ready to go out on the road on the 30th of September this year.

And I'll be standing on that stage in my last program is Mark Twain when I laid down my pen at the territorial enterprise.

I had four horse whippings and two duels on coming.

And yet when I said goodbye to a Virginia City, Carson City, Lake Tahoe, I knew I was saying goodbye to the most vigorous enjoyment of life I would ever be afforded.

Those days were full to the brim with the wine of life, and there have been no others like them.

When I first started out being Mark Twain, I made myself a promise.

One half to don't play loosely with his material and make Twain scholars happy.

And I've stuck to that all 35 years, and I'm proud of that right now.

We're back in Locust Grove at the rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry, about to record a podcast.

Shaun, what's the name of your podcast?

It's called Wacky Poems.

Like Wacky Poem Life.

This is co-host Bill Guthrie.

And where can you find out information about the wacky poem, Life, Wacky poem Life .com should have guessed it.

Before he recorded that, I wanted to let you know that you can see past episodes of Gallery America too, by going to the PBS app or visiting our website at OETA Dot TV slash Gallery America.

And be sure to follow Gallery America Online on Facebook and on Instagram, and to Gallery.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Until next time stay are Oklahoma and wacky too.